Intel Core i7 3960X (Sandy Bridge E) Review: Keeping the High End Alive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 14, 2011 3:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- Sandy Bridge E
Power Consumption
At idle, the 3960X's power consumption is barely discernible from the 2600K. Under load however, Sandy Bridge E can draw significantly more power. We measured 35% more power draw over a 2600K. The added power consumption makes sense. The chip has more cores and a larger cache, without introducing a more power efficient architecture or a new manufacturing process.
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actionjksn - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure the motherboard makers will add the extra ports, even though the controllers aren't built into the processor or chipset.just4U - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
mmm double standards..hechacker1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
No, not double standards.This chip does outclass it's competition (50 plus percent) in some cases that are highly threaded.
It actually uses all of those transistors to be a speed daemon. Bulldozer just doesn't, even with its 2 billion transistors.
Phylyp - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Does the 2+ billion transistor count reflect the 2 cores that are fused also, or only the active transistors?iceman-sven - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
I was interested in SB-E and the X79 platform, but i will skip it and continue to use my i7 965X. Maybe I go for IB-E, but it is doubtful, when the Nvidia Kepler GPU is released. What I really want is Haswell-E on something like a EVGA Classified Super Record 2 (SR-2) class Motherboard.cearny - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Thanks for including the Chromium build time test :)For GCC people out there, why not a Kernel build time test in the future also?
DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Actually why not do a chromium build in GCC to make the two numbers more directly comparable. Doing it this way will give a 'free' article on which compiler is better.ckryan - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
What about the corresponding release of Intel's next SSD?We had speculated that since it missed it's initial window that it would have been released on the 14th with SB-E. I guess we were wrong again.
Anyone want to field this?
xpclient - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Why? You have got newer multicore specific benchmarks that prove otherwise wise guy? Then share them.xpclient - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Here's a Jan 2010 benchmark: http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-7s-kill... Fact: You would need 8 core machines before Windows 7 can outperform XP.